I was born, in 1920 in Pasco, Washington, near the Columbia River, where the Snake River and the Yakima River empties into it. My first job was on the farm. In 1934, I worked in a service station for a dollar a day. I was 14. In those days that was a lot of money—many men were unemployed. That’s all they got. It was a full service station. In those days you were literally pumping gas with a hand pump. You pumped and pumped until the gas filled a glass cylinder with little marks on it: you counted: a gallon, two gallons—then you pumped that into the car.
After that job—that was between 8th grade and my freshman year—I finished high school. See, one of my best friend’s father owned a steam laundry and they needed wood fires to make the steam. That’s how we got into the wood business. Mr. McIlraith took all the wood we couldn’t sell to regular customers. I worked for 25 cents a cord of wood. The wood was essentially free, we paid 50 cents loading fee to the lumber company.
And on top of that fee, there was a $2.38 shipping fee to ship a freight carload of wood from Klikitat, Washington. Each carload held some 18 to 21 cords. We had three days to unload the car or pay demoorage charges. So we worked fast to unload it. We did this job year round. That’s why we stayed out of school for two or three years. Sometimes I went to school only 2 or 3 days a week. But I still did my homework. I worked at home too.
I was making 25 cents a cord and the rest went into the pot, back into the business. It was waste wood from Douglas fir trees, that nobody else wanted. What they call “first cut” logs, where they trimmed off the bark. It came in 16-inch lengths. Sometimes it was so heavy and wet, it took the three of us to lift off those slabs. Those slabs were considered waste wood in those days and we were able to get it for free. The wood was always the first cut off the logs and it was always heavy and wet. It came from the mountains of south central Washington. Later on, I would take some of that wood home to our farm and we’d stack it in rigs, and then sell it later as dry wood for $6.50 a cord.
I wasn’t financially able to go to college but my friends went. So I bought the business. We started with a ’29 Chevrolet truck. It cost $75. Mr McIlwaith loaned the money to us. That $75 truck was essentially what we started the business with. We were three boys: Bill Mcilraith, Curtis Hall and “Duke” Anthony. Sometimes we’d unload 18-20 cords of wood in a day. We’d start early in the morning and we’d worked until nightfall. This was real desert country, sometimes it got up to 120° in the summertime. You had to be careful of the heat. Sometimes little slivers of wood would come off and you’d be itching like crazy in that heat. We were sweaty and itchy, keeping clean was a problem.
Bill McIlraith—his father owned the US Laundry, the other boy was Robert—we called him “Duke” I don’t know why—he was a goofy guy. He later worked for the Northern Pacific railroad, for years. I went by my middle name, Fenton. Bill is still alive and we call each other every month or two. He’s my age, 87. One of the fellows, Curtis, is dead. I ran that business after they left for school. Bill’s father paid us each 25 cents a cord. It kept us going.
One of our best customers was a Chinese family who ran a laundry. The flat irons were heated up on cast iron stoves and they were also used to heat the beds at night. They lived in a small compound near the railroad tracks. The father of this Chinese family came here as a coolie. One of Mr. Howe’s sons became a top notch cameraman. Wong Howe was a famous Chinese camera man in Hollywood, he went to school with my oldest brother. There was a story about him in Collier’s Magazine or the Saturday Evening Post. I remember one time he came to town, he arrived in a Dusenberg, and he parked it right in front of the Liberty Theater.
But in 1939, I caught pneumonia (there were no antibiotics in those days) and when I got out of the hospital, and the day following my release from thee hospital, I took the civil service exam. The competition was so fierce that 100 people took the test for one job. I took two tests: city clerk and rural mail carrier. Well, I passed with high marks and I got the job, For two years I carried the mail through sleet and snow—sometimes the mail boxes would be frozen shut. It was a great job. I had a car which was great at Christmas when the mail got too heavy to carry—that was when all the catalogues came out: Sears Roebuck, Mongomery Ward. I’d hire the guy who delivered wood for me to help me out. I had a 32 mile route. I did it for two years before I went into the Navy.
The 21st of May, 1942 was the day I left home. That was the day I entered the Navy. I was trained in San Diego. I went to Texas, to the A&M College where I was trained in electronics. In those days RADAR was a secret word. I was an apprentice seaman for longer than anyone else in the Navy. The Navy paid my tuition—or I should say the training was courtesy of the Navy.
I came to Treasure Island for 3 months training in radio material. We copied diagrams in our notebooks that never left our side. The schematics of radar was so secret that at night the Navy held onto our copybooks. They kept them locked up in a safe. I left SF to go to Bremerton shipyards in Washington to go to the Prince William—an escort carrier. I was 22 when I went into the Navy. I met my wife on a train but that’s another story. — Leslie Foster, 3/2/07
Melba Call
One of my first government jobs was when I was a guide for the State home teachers for the blind. I drove someone who was known as the Helen Keller of Alaska, I drove her around for 3 months. My older sister worked in the county welfare office, they supervised the job, she loaned me her car. I was 18 at the time. It wasn’t much of a job but it was appreciated. This woman was an Eskimo who was abandoned by her tribe—it was because she was blind from rickets or beriberi. It was a custom of the tribe to abandon someone who was a burden. She wasn’t always blind for she could remember colors: the green of the grass and the red of the sun and so forth, When I met her, she was totally blind but she was educated in many Washington schools, she taught Braille and typing, she taught piano, she was very self sufficient. She used to stand in front of a mirror to put on her make up. That was how she was trained to put it on. In front of a mirror!
Her name was Melba Call, she was in her 30s. Call was the name of the missionary family that found her, took her in and raised her. She taught me a lot about observation during those three months. I drove her to the homes of her clients. I would take her to the door and I’d introduce her. She was employed as a state home teacher for the blind. She would go into the home and teach the women to become self reliant, she’d teach them to get around in their own homes, to cook, and sew. She taught Braille, she made them self-sufficient. She had gone to a special school for the blind in Massachusetts, That’s where she got the name, Helen Keller of the North. I drove her 50 60 miles in each direction. They were all on scattered farms. It was just a sideline in my life It taught me to see because I was her vision. She was very inquisitive. One time she came down to San Rafael to get a seeing eye dog. Hers had been killed.
As we drive along the back roads, she’d ask me to describe in detail whatever it was I saw. We drove up through the Yakima Valley, there’d be cliffs on one side, orchards and farmland, we were driving along the shoulder of the valley the river below. At a certain point several hundred feet above the river this was wide open country. We’d see Mt. Ranier, Mt. Adams covered with snow. and I’d describe them to her. It taught me a great deal about observation. This was prior to the war. She looked Japanese, like the Ainu of the north, some people were so conditioned by the hostility between Japan and America, they were hostile to her, an Eskimo native. But she would overcome it like she overcame her blindness.
–Leslie Fenton Foster
